The production and use of still pictures and video is found in a wide variety of venues ranging from television studios, webcasting, photography, and so forth. However, limitations of current techniques hamper the production of video in many circumstances. In particular, current imaging techniques do not easily tolerate uncontrolled lighting, changes in lighting conditions, and so forth.
To ameliorate these problems, traditional systems may capture multiple images under varying lighting conditions and use these images to generate better quality images. However, this involves complicated lighting, computationally expensive and slow post-capture processing, and other serious drawbacks limiting the traditional situations to highly controlled environments, such as a studio.
Furthermore, special effects such as matting, which composites a live actor in front of a synthesized or previously imaged background elements, have relied upon chroma keying. For reliable performance, individuals and objects present in the foreground must not have colors close to the chroma key. This limits the utility of chroma keying to situations where the environment and the participants are controlled, such as in a studio. Conventional chroma keying requires carefully controlled lighting and backgrounds, also confining its use to the studio.